Under Construction:

The future of the workplace in the post-pandemic era remains very much an unresolved debate. Some employers have begun to mandate a return to the office. Some, like tech giant Apple, have instituted a partial return. Other companies, Shopify for example, have wholeheartedly embraced remote work and the flexibility it entails and have happily pocketed the savings of a reduced brick-and-mortar footprint.

The one thing that does seem clear is that the status quo of the pre-pandemic workplace is no longer a given. Forbes recently cited a survey of HR leaders that said just four percent of businesses are requiring all employees to return to the workplace full-time. Bottom line: It’s no longer automatic that everyone gets up and commutes to a fixed office.

And so, if we agree that things will never return to the way they were, the question remains: What becomes of all that unused office space?

Smart policy

Several cities have begun exploring an answer, putting in place the legal and regulatory changes that are necessary for developers, architects, and builders to consider transforming office towers into residential housing.

Doing so is smart policy, particularly with so much office space now vacant. Cities need more affordable housing, and converting a building is cheaper than building new. The RAND Center on Housing and Homelessness in Los Angeles says that construction for adaptive reuse projects cost, on average, around US$340,000 per unit, 48 percent less than new construction projects (US$164,000 less per unit).

And the carbon footprint savings when converting an existing building rather than building a new one is considerable – consider 35 percent of an office tower’s lifecycle

carbon is emitted during construction, a figure that climbs to 51 percent for a residential building, according to the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.

The City of Los Angeles was among the first to see the upside of adaptive reuse and in 1999 began making the legislative changes needed to create incentives for conversion. Many other U.S. cities have since begun to do the same. Chicago, Washington, D.C., Alexandria, Virginia, L.A., and Cleveland are now the top five cities in the nation for the number of embarked-upon office conversions since 2020.

Drive density

In Canada, the City of Calgary in 2021 announced a plan to spend nearly $1 billion over ten years to spur office conversion. In the U.K., London aims to turn empty offices into 1,500 apartments by 2030.

The conversion of office to residential use opens up the opportunity to retrofit those buildings with the latest in carbon-saving technologies and building materials and to bring those buildings into line with modern lighting, water use, and other environmental and ergonomic standards.

And of course residences rather than offices will help drive density and efficient land use and will make downtowns more livable, with the presence of people extended beyond office hours, people who in turn will attract the small businesses and restaurants that fuel local micro-economies.

All of it makes far more sense than leaving an office tower idle and empty in the (now unlikely) post-pandemic hope that people will once again commute to their workplace.

The office, and the home office, are ideas undergoing some significant renovation.